


And There Was Light (7/8 Time Love Is Not Harmless remix)

by Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Community: remixredux07, F/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-14
Updated: 2007-04-14
Packaged: 2017-10-08 09:06:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth and Jack, after the end of the world--the Pearl, the stars, and what to do with a life when you're not sure how many choices you've already made. Thanks to Marna for help on betaing. This was written before the release of the third movie on no spoilers, so it contradicts some established canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And There Was Light (7/8 Time Love Is Not Harmless remix)

His grin was a flash of light on that cold black sea. "First you kiss to kill me, now you kiss to bring me back," he whispered into her mouth, not even opening his eyes. "I always said you'd make a brilliant pirate, Elizabeth."

* * *

During the day Jack was quiet. Sunlight seemed to bleach him out, leaving nothing but a Jack-outline on which his trinkets hung. Sometimes she wondered that such a specter could leave a shadow. But at night, under the stars, the fey blood came back, the grins and laughter and swaying steps, Jack as _Jack_ with his bright eyes and the world beckoning in his gestures. But even then, to her, he was distant; whenever she went near him he stopped what he was doing and just looked at her, sometimes wary, sometimes angry, sometimes gentle. Never lustful. He never leered as he had before the last time she'd kissed him. The next-to-last-time she'd kissed him.

Elizabeth hated herself for missing it.

She refused to make the assumption that she would become, as a matter of course, Captain Jack Sparrow's bedwarmer, and wondered why he never asked her. The crew treated her well enough, but always seemed surprised when she found her own bunk to sleep in. Except for Gibbs, who nodded sagely and offered her his hand and his advice on sailing with equal rough grace.

After a month of sailing with the Black Pearl, Gibbs let her know that Jack said she could get off at any port she wished, any time she wished. She thanked him, and took a moment to let the reeling deck settle under her feet. Then she went and confronted Jack at the helm. "Do you want to be rid of me that much?" she said angrily. "I can pick any port at all, with no money, no skills, no contacts? No way to keep myself but whoring?"

"You've family in England, I assumed," he said offhandedly, not moving his hands from the wheel.

She could only stare. "You're... you're not going to sail to _Portsmouth_," she said, disbelievingly.

"Who makes the I'm-not-going-tos on this ship, hmm?" he said, finally looking at her. "Not even me. So don't you try it."

He handed the wheel to Gibbs, started sauntering back toward his cabin. She followed on his heels. "You want me off your conscience so terribly that you'd risk sailing the Pearl into an English harbour?"

"If you're going to be like that, you could probably get yourself back from Gibraltar," he said over his shoulder. "Passage wouldn't beggar me, not with this load, and we could even fit you a dress or two so you wouldn't look too disrespectable."

"You're trying to buy me off, now," she sniped. She couldn't stop her own words, couldn't take them back once she'd said them. "Like a child. Buy me some sweets, why don't you? Maybe that will distract me long enough to make you forget--"

"D'you want to stay or don't you?" Jack finally asked, turning around to glare at her. She stopped short, one foot still in the air, unable to touch the next step down.

For a moment, she couldn't meet his eyes, couldn't do anything but look to the curves of his hands, the curve of his mouth. Couldn't, suddenly, think of anything but the flush in her cheeks and what Norrington had hissed at her in the midst of battle, perspicacious--"How many ex-fiancees are you planning on having?"

And then his lips were on hers, and she realized that he was kissing her for the first time, the first time he was kissing her instead of the other way around. It was over as soon as she realized it, and he was looking at her, intense and almost angry.

"You want me to stay, then?" she whispered. _You want me, then?_ she desperately wanted to shout.

His grin was taut as sails under wind. "I don't want you thinking I'll give you a benediction," he said. "You'll stay if you want to. You'll bed me if it pleases you. But you've got to be making up your mind as to exactly what treasures you want to be chasing after."

She bit her lip. "I don't want to be put off--I think."

"Making a pirate of yourself, then?" The grin was more natural now. "You make a better one than Will."

"Will left, and I feel nothing but relief," she snapped, angry he should bring up Will, angry that she didn't even know herself how she felt about it. "Does that make me a bad person?"

"Oh, yes." He nodded solemnly. "Very bad indeed." He leaned forward until he could whisper, "But a good pirate."

* * *

In her dreams, sometimes, she saw Will, silver-skinned in the moonlight, boyish and stern. "Was I always the _safe_ one?" he would say, accusing. She wanted to answer him no, but the waves would reach up and claim her in kraken-tentacles, and she'd wake up choking on the taste of salt.

* * *

The work was backbreaking. She'd once been rich; she'd once had her father's house, the town of Port Royal, to explore and command. Her life now was a floating box a hundred feet long by thirty wide, and the wide and merciless ocean.

Will had loved the ocean. Still must, in his way, chosen to go beyond the waves with the Flying Dutchman. But he'd never been able to ride her moods quite the way Jack could, fingers clenched around the wheel like the mane of a wild mare, grin wide in the lashing of rain and lightning. Jack would never tame the ocean, but he could move with her in savageness.

She'd never spoken to Commodore Norrington about the ocean. Strange, that a man who spent so little time ashore almost never spoke about the sea.

Jack instructed Elizabeth in gentler arts, every evening. Geometry, trigonometry, cartography, astronomy. She asked him once why he bothered, what with the compass that never pointed north.

"A man can lose a compass, a man can lose a ship," he said patiently. "He can't lose what he's got inside him, unless he's so dead he's not a man any more."

"And are you so dead," she said, "that you're not a man any more?"

He stood quickly, chair legs scraping the deck, and suddenly she feared her tongue had gotten her into trouble she couldn't repair. But he only stopped a foot from her and squinted down into her eyes, and said, "It sounds to me, Miss Swann, that you're trying to tempt the fates."

"You'd know more about that than me," she said softly.

He cocked his head and grinned, then swept his arm toward the door. "You've got watch."

* * *

They moved, inexorably, toward England. Her hair bleached in the sun, her skin tanned. She ran her hands over her breasts and the flatness of her stomach in private, wondered if he found her still beautiful, if the calluses on his fingers would feel anything like those on her own, if he would touch her, just... there...

* * *

"You still haven't given me a real answer," he said at the railing one night.

Sprinkles of stars above them, the fading of twilight in the distance. The sharp-silhouetted coast of Africa was ahead, somewhere, waiting for them to find it.

Elizabeth bent her head away, and muttered, "I can't think when my life's all in pieces."

"We've got nothing but pieces, love," he said. "Best start picking them up if we're to go anywhere."

"I've loved you since you dragged me from the water in Port Royal," she said. "You want me because I couldn't possibly love you. All of this suggests I should leave you when we get to our next stop."

She wondered if anyone else had ever managed to surprise Captain Jack Sparrow in quite this fashion.

"Ah... this is the opportune moment to say something to make you stay, is it?"

She licked suddenly dry lips, tasted wind-chap and fear. "Only if you want me to stay."

"You're becoming a fair hand, with practice."

The strangled noise in her throat was not of her own making. "Jack..."

"Bess, Bess, gentle Elizabeth," he said, taking her hands. His eyes were dark, and crinkled at the corners with laughter. "I'll pluck a thousand stars from the sky, and make a crown of them for you to wear, if only you'll stay and be my pirate lass. We'll never give up, and we'll never grow old, and they'll sing legends of us down throughout the ages."

"And tomorrow, Jack?"

He shook his head. "There is no tomorrow in this life. Only tonight, and the stars, and the inconstant moon. Make your choice on that."

She looked at him, finally _looked_ at him, and saw him almost for the first time, there on the cusp of the horizon. He was looking at her kindly, without malice, almost with hesitation.

She realized that all she'd wanted and never expected to get was everything here--Jack and the Pearl and freedom together, underneath the stars. How could she ever refuse them offered? She smiled, and he smiled with her. "Yes, Jack. I'll stay."

He laughed, and pulled her close, and kissed her there, in the cold wind. Then he turned her around in his arms and pointed upwards. She squinted and looked up.

There, against the black and the pockmarks of stars, a brilliant streak of light. And another, and another, and again.

"Of the thousand stars for your crown, love," he said, "I'll start with these tonight."

She laughed in delight and drew his arms closer around her. "You knew this would happen, didn't you, you cheat?"

"Pirate," he murmured into her ear, and smiled. "Always remember that."

* * *

It had been a terrible dinner party; she'd been listening to her father and half the officers in the fleet drone on about perfectly stupefying business all night. It was only when Captain Norrington was asked about his recent engagement with the Cuckoo's Flight and her pirate crew that her interest was even mildly piqued.

The captain had sought her out, after the meal was over and the guests had been invited to mingle. "Why pirates?" he asked, holding his glass of brandy like a shield.

She looked out the window, onto the flat mirror of the sea. "I suppose it's because they aren't gentlemen," she said softly, "and they don't do what they ought to."

Norrington's reflection in the window was unreadable for a long moment, before he excused himself and turned away. She stayed, watching the sunlight fade from the evening sky, until the hills were crowned by stars.


End file.
